Experts are calling it “the worst voter suppression bill ever seriously considered by Congress.” As the U.S. Senate prepares to vote on a Trump-backed voter ID bill known as the SAVE Act, millions of citizens who lack easy access to its required forms of documentation are now at risk of disenfranchisement. “Republicans are singularly focused on making it harder to vote and pursuing this MAGA fever dream,” explains Ari Berman, national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones. “It is the overarching goal of the Republican Party now to make it harder to vote.”
The groups most at risk of disenfranchisement include people who have changed their names after marriage, older voters who never received birth certificates, rural voters who could find it increasingly difficult to register to vote and trans people who have changed their names or gender markers on government documents. The GOP and MAGA movement’s goal, says Imara Jones, the founder and CEO of TransLash Media, “is to enshrine anti-trans discrimination in the law, because what they’re doing is using trans people as a road test in order to try to figure out how to disenfranchise and marginalize and strip citizenship away from millions of Americans who disagree with them.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told the media that the families of troops killed in the war on Iran offered their full support, telling him to “finish the job.” The father of one of the U.S. service members told NBC News that that was an outright lie. “What I heard through tears, through hugs, through strength, and through unbreakable resolve was the same from family after family. They said, ‘Finish this. Honor their sacrifice. Do not waver. Do not stop until the job is done,’” Hegseth said Thursday morning. Charles Simmons—father of 28-year-old Tech. Sgt. Tyler H. Simmons, one of six service members who died in a refueling plane that crashed in Iraq last week—told a very different story. “I can’t speak for the other families. When he spoke to me, that was not something we talked about,” he told NBC News later Thursday, rejecting Hegseth’s claim that he told him to keep fighting. “No, I didn’t say anything along those lines.… Who wants war? … Sometimes it’s a necessity, and I just don’t know what’s going on.”While Simmons did note that both Hegseth and President Donald Trump extended genuine compassion and condolences to him, it’s impossible to ignore that Hegseth lied about “family after family” coming up to him to tell him to keep bombing Iran. He used flowery, sentimental language—while misrepresenting the voices of at least one grieving parent—to continue to drum up support for an incredibly unpopular war that has already killed thousands of civilians in Lebanon and Iran.
As Israel continues to pummel Lebanon in its resumed war against the country and the Hezbollah paramilitary, we get an update from Associated Press reporter Kareem Chehayeb in Beirut. “If you compare this particular war to the last one, less than two years ago, what happened in the past three weeks is what happened in the past seven or eight months,” says Chehayeb, who describes masses of displaced people and fears of an imminent ground invasion. “There is a humanitarian crisis unfolding in the country, and it doesn’t appear that these strikes will stop anytime soon.”